MODERATOR’S NOTE: This thread is devolving into bickering. Please knock it off. The Terms of Service state that CC is not a debate site. Going back and forth at each other repeatedly is not permitted. I have deleted a few posts. Warnings will be given if the bickering continues.
It’s larger than a K-12 issue it’s also a cultural issue. You can offer the greatest schools in the world but it’s useless if no one cares about using them.
@Dolemite You are right that there is a cultural issue as well, but with so many struggling k-12 school districts, it makes the cultural side harder to fix.
I think many people feel (and are not wrong) that public education is a zero sum game - if black (or Mexican, etc) schools get more resources, the money must come from white schools. If black schools are integrated those white kids get an inferior education, if black kids attend white schools, it takes places away from other white kids. So (white) people fight that.
If you have the funds it doesn’t matter because you can just go private in most areas of the country.
@OHMomof2 I’m saying that it doesn’t matter how much you spend you can’t force people to use it if they don’t value it.
As @ChangeTheGame said to @Dolemite
You are right that there is a cultural issue as well, but with so many struggling k-12 school districts, it makes the cultural side harder to fix.
Exactly.
We have to start somewhere. And @ChangeTheGame this is why I am confused a little by your comments that AA isn’t the answer, but fixing K-12 is…we have to start somewhere. It’s the same point you are making to @Dolemite…yes, there are bigger issues (like cultural ones) but if we address what we can impact in the short term, one would hope that it will ultimately help fix some of the long term problems. This may take more than our generation…so in the meantime, there are some things we can do to help improve opportunities for those less fortunate (no matter what race they are!)
@OHMomof2 I have often wondered about the Zero Sum game. The optimist in me thinks we will all win if we bridge the gap better in educational opportunities for our nation’s children/young adults. IMO, a better educated society will benefit us all. And maybe the super crazy competitive high schools (public) won’t be so super crazy competitive anymore if this is truly a zero sum situation? But maybe this in the end wouldn’t be such a bad thing for all parties involved.
It is not necessarily a zero-sum game. For example, maintaining segregated schools may require having schools that are too small to be efficient (e.g. no school has enough students to make it worthwhile to offer some types of advanced courses), compared to having one big integrated school.
From my viewpoint of 20+ years in inner-city Philadelphia you can’t ‘fix’ K-8 just by throwing money at it if it’s not valued. And you can’t make it valued just by making it ‘better’. I’ve seen people ‘waste’ great schools because they weren’t valued and I’ve seen people take the bare minimum of schools and do great things because they were valued.
I’m all for giving more and better resources where they are truly wanted. And I’m all for strategies to make education more valued by everyone but that needs to happen first.
@PossePops storied similar to your is what I have seen a lot. Kids get in based on superlative stats but they can’t attend the schools because so little aid is offered. The worst is when none of the schools end up being affordable. There is a lot of myth surrounding this topic. My city’s schools are, I think, around 70% African American. If you compare prep school graduates with limited diversity, sure, things might seem biased. But when you look at kids from public magnets schools that are majority nonwhite, the disparities become more apparent. Even with kids with perfect SAT scores and 4.0s. There are no automatic admissions anywhere and definitely no automatic aid.
@Dolemite I agree with a lot of what you are saying, but we cannot turn our backs on these schools either…definitely cannot afford to take money away from them.
As it relates to the topic of this thread, IMO, having Affirmative Action, or similar policies in place, would hopefully yield a more diverse array of role models that impact more neighborhoods in a positive way and hopefully help get “…education more valued by everyone” as you say.
If more kids see good things happening for the graduates from their communities, whether that be getting into good colleges or whatever, that would hopefully help the situation and be inspirational for them (and their parents/caregivers?)
A lot needs to be done on multiple different levels. Perhaps there need to be “community organizers”…this definitely is not just something that Affirmative Action alone can take care of. But it’s one piece of the puzzle, in my opinion. And we need to keep trying to fix it.
@collegemomjam I agree with everything that @Dolemite has said above. Money alone will not fix the issues that plague inner city schools. The cultural failure actually begins with the breakdown of the African American family. When you look at the height of Jim Crow laws (when African Americans dealt with many forms of overt racism) less than 15% of black women had children out of wedlock. At the height of the Civil Rights movement about 28% of black women had children out of wedlock. Today, with more programs to help African Americans than at any point in the history of America, over 70% of black women are having children out of wedlock.
My own front seat view of this breakdown begins with the extra government benefits (food stamps, government insurance , etc.) that were given to single mothers, so it seemed beneficial to not get married during the 70’s by “working the system” and getting “free money”. I saw this play out many times in my youth and Black men started to “detach” from our families. What started as a government policy to help people ended up helping to start the decline of the black family (along with bad reasoning) from my viewpoint. Along with the drug wars and criminal justice crackdowns, black men were decimated in the community I grew up in. The cultural issues that plague the African American community can not be solved by a government policy, but must come from within our own communities. When it comes to helping African Americans with racial preferences, that policy has been around since the Civil Rights Era. Have things gotten better? In some ways yes, but our families have fallen apart at the same time. Fixing the k-12 issues would help a lot more African Americans long-term along with trying to fix the cultural issues (Black Church should be a big part of the solution). My thoughts on fixing the black community are about 50-60 pages back. I believe that the more we (African Americans) are allowed to have a lower standard, the lower you may need to make that standard. It is crazy to me that African Americans as a whole may be in worse shape today than we were in 1964 before AA even with all of the advances. Our kids had their fathers, their faith, and a common goal in 1964. Today we have a splintered community where the ones who make it out never go back and live and where we don’t pull anyone with us.
@Dolemite I think a lot of people have identified the problem as being a mismatch in expectations. So, people with lower socioeconomic status value education a lot and that is consistent in polling, etc. But there is often a cultural mismatch between parents’ expectation for a good education, meaning high grades above all else and what a good education really is (challenge, hard work). I volunteer in an inner-city public school. The building is beautiful, lots of resources, fancy stuff. But the teachers have low expectations and the parents are confused about how to best help their children so the kids literally learn nothing. The parents know success is driven by good grades but they have no idea what their kids need to get there so they do their homework for them, demand accommodations the kids don’ need, etc. They “help” in all the wrong ways. And the kids get cheated of a real education. They don’t learn how to learn. Eventually, they catch on and realize no one thinks they can learn. It’s vicious.
By 1960, African American people were more likely to live in cities than other American people, but that is the beginning of the era of higher lead exposure (particularly from emissions from vehicles using leaded gasoline). Such lead exposure (likely to be greater in cities with a higher density of vehicle emitting lead from their tailpipes), particularly in early childhood, has been implicated in higher crime and other social problems through the 1980s and early 1990s, but dropping considerably since then:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2017/06/01/new-evidence-that-lead-exposure-increases-crime/
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/
At the end of the day, I really wish college application process was a blind system, with no racial or ethnic, income or even gender profile. Everyone gets in based on academic/extra curricular/athletic/etc… achievements. That would be my wish.
I agree with legomaia. How does a white female/male willing to pay full fare get into a top 15 school if you aren’t legacy or an athlete? There are no places for these people. Do athletes that are white count as whites? I imagine this takes up a lot of “white” spots. If you are low income, minority, etc you get my spot. I have worked extremely hard beginning in 5th grade to get in upper level courses and have maintained this all through high school but it doesn’t matter because I have no box and I don’t have a “story”. Just doesn’t seem fair.
@goodjob, you or anybody else don’t have “a spot.”
One thing top schools look for is graciousness, humility and the ability to effectively communicate and collaborate with people who may be very different. In that, they mirror almost every other institution in modern society.
Oh I don’t know the details. But you know what some Alaskan Native Indians look more Asian than Indian. this website is addicting. So fun reading all the comments…
These students get admitted all the time.
What century is this from? Brown v Board of Education was in 1954. Granted, it took some time for implementation, but by the time most parents on here were in high school, integration was a done deal. There are no more white schools or black schools or Mexican schools, unless they’re privates.